4HWW Muse How-To Archives

Would you kick yourself if something as simple as changing the size of your Add To Cart button increased your online revenue by 10%?

Even though online business owners know that split testing can greatly increase their online revenue… many still don’t do it.

There are so many things that you could be testing like headlines, body text, layouts, colors, menus… it can get overwhelming really quick.

So where do you start?

Buttons.

VS.

Which do you want to click on?

Something as deceptively simple as changing the size and color of your Call To Action button can have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Studies have shown that, in general, the bigger and brighter your Call To Action button… the more conversions you will get.

And yet still there are so many dull and boring buttons out there.

So how do I get awesome buttons that people want to click on?

1. DaButtonFactory is a free online tool that will generate button images for you quickly. It has nice templates and an easy interface so there is no need to bust out the Photoshop. It takes literally 30 seconds to make a button and get it on your site. I especially like the Ubuntu button template and Twitter button template. Make sure to test out different variations of the button text like “Sign Up Now” vs. “Sign Up For Free”.

2. The “Belcher Button“ is the de facto standard button of internet marketing that you have probably seen in one variation or another. It may seem a bit obnoxious, but the statistics show that it does work very well, especially for long sales letters. Perry Belcher found this button had 35% to 320% higher conversions than any other button. The two best Belcher Button Generators online are this Flash Belcher Button Creator With Rollover Effects and this JPG Belcher Button Creator.

So how can I test these on my site and track the results?

Optimizely is an online tool that makes split testing super easy. I’ve used it extensively for the Tropical MBA and my other clients’ businesses and I love the visual interface that allows you to drag and drop and make changes directly to your webpage. It’s so easy that you can set up a split test in under 5 minutes without needing any technical knowledge. And you can try Optimizely free for 30 days.

You can also use Google Website Optimizer to conduct your split test, but you will have to manually create the different page variations and get them set up yourself.

How do I know it will work for me?

It is important to remember that even though a certain type of button has shown to work well for other online businesses, it may not necessarily work for you. Don’t take my word for it. Test it yourself with Optimizely.

Also, there are lots of factors that influence the decision of someone to buy your product or sign up. That’s why it is important to regulary split test your website, especially your “money pages” (the ones bringing you the most signups / sales). If you aren’t split testing then you are leaving money on the table.

By split testing one “money page” for a Tropical MBA niche business I increased Add To Cart clicks by 33%. If you don’t have the time or inclination to regularly split test and optimize your “money pages” I can Increase Your Conversions for you.

A 1 second delay in page response results in a 7% reduction in conversions.

The speed of your website is also a significant factor in SEO and search rankings.

Faster site = higher search rankings.

In April 2010, Google stated on their webmaster tools blog that site speed was a new factor within their search ranking algorithms. Faster sites = better user experience, and this is what Google prides itself on delivering.

W3 Total Cache plugin is the most popular WordPress plugin for optimizing site performance and can give significant performance improvements. It can be somewhat complicated to set up properly so use the settings below to get the best performance on most websites (some setups may require additional tweaking):

Here are the plugin general settings you need (for more detailed instructions check out this guide):

check enable all forms of caching

uncheck enable CDN

go to cloud flare section and disable for now (You will enable the CloudFlare component later but keep it disabled for now so you can confirm the plugin is working so far.)

Once this plugin is installed then every image you upload from now on will be optimized automatically.

However, you probably have lots of images on your site already so you should run a bulk smush on them. This can take several minutes if you have a lot of images so let the process run to completion. Restart it if the smush times out.

Run a bulk smush on all your images: In WordPress Dashboard go to Media -> Bulk Smush.it

The performance benefits you get from Smush.it will depend on how many images you have on your site and how large they are.

Cloudflare is a free Content Delivery Network (CDN) which keeps saved copies of your website on servers all over the world. When a visitor comes to your website Cloudflare will deliver the saved copy of your website from the server closest to your visitor which can decrease loading time significantly.

Go to Cloudflare.com, sign up for a free account, and follow their instructions

Some people might think that a successful 4HWW muse idea is magicly created as if out of thin air. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Trying to divine the “perfect idea” in a vacuum rarely works.

The best 4HWW muse ideas always come about from your own personal experience. Time and time again I see successful online businesses being developed by people scratching their own itch or the itch of their clients.